While it is common for customers to purchase goods in person at a physical store and carry those goods home with them, the delivery of purchased goods is also quite common. Such delivery has long been performed in connection with the ordering of products from a paper catalog, and has been increasing driven by the advent and increasing market penetration of web merchants that make products available for selection and purchase via the World Wide Web (“the web”). Like other kinds of mail order merchants, many web merchants operate or otherwise use multiple distribution centers, from which products are shipped to customers, often using a third-party carrier to perform the delivery.
Such web merchants typically use a few conventional approaches to delivering products ordered by a customer. For an order containing a single item, the item is typically shipped in a single container from a distribution center having stock in the item to a delivery address specified by the customer, such as a delivery address at which the customer can receive packages, or a delivery address of a gift recipient to whom the order is a gift from the customer.
For an order containing multiple items all in stock at a single distribution center, these items are collected and sent from the distribution center to the delivery address specified for the order as a single shipment, made up of one or more containers. In these cases, the carrier typically charges the web merchant a single delivery fee for the shipment, sometimes even if the shipment is made up of several containers that are all going from the same origination point to the same destination of the same time. It can often be difficult and/or expensive for a web merchant that makes a wide variety of items available for purchase and permits customers to order any combination of items to ensure that all of a particular combination of items will be available from a single distribution center.
For an order containing multiple items not all in stock at a single distribution center, two alternative conventional approaches can be employed. As a first alternative, a set of two or more distribution centers is selected that collectively have stock in all of the ordered items. Each selected distribution center ships its subset of the ordered items to the order's delivery address as a separate shipment. When the first alternative is used, the carrier who delivers each shipment charges the web merchant a delivery fee for the shipment. The sum of these delivery fees is often larger than would be the single delivery fee for a single shipment from a single distribution center to the customer.
As a second alternative, an originating distribution center that has stock in at least one of the ordered items is selected. Any items not in stock at the originating distribution center are shipped to the originating distribution center from other distributions having stock. After all of these transferred items are received at the originating distribution center, a single shipment is sent from the originating distribution center to the delivery address. When the second alternative is used, the carrier who delivers each shipment charges the web merchant a delivery fee for the shipment. Again, the sum of these delivery fees is often larger than would be the single delivery fee for a single shipment from a single distribution center to the customer.
In view of the foregoing, an approach to efficient shipping items from two or more distribution centers to a customer would have significant utility.